were here, I’m sure she’d remind me that he’s very effable.
But even Chloe’s imagined double entendre isn’t enough to make me not mad at him right now. White-hot indignation floods my system as I think about what he just said. Coffee Girl. Ugh. There’s no way this guy can give the romantic comedy genre the respect it deserves.
Chapter Seven
I manage to more or less avoid Drew on set the next day, since he’s actually focused on his job instead of putting me in my place. Whenever I’m not on set, though, I have to write articles, because internet content doesn’t make itself. Tommy has some phone call with an executive scheduled for Thursday evening, so we wrap up in the afternoon, and I’m free to spend the rest of the day in bed, writing.
Well, writing and researching Drew.
It’s not that I feel good about typing his name into the search bar on my laptop. In fact, I feel pretty creepy about it, like Meg Ryan does at the beginning of You’ve Got Mail when she’s trying to secretly e-mail Tom Hanks without arousing Greg Kinnear’s suspicions.
But I don’t have a bland, clearly-not-right-for-me boyfriend to observe my actions. I only have my own secret shame as I ignore the article I’m supposed to be writing on at-home hemorrhoid relief.
It’s just that the last time Chloe was trying to convince me that I should be actively pursuing Drew because he’s my Tom Hanks, she was trying to describe his specific brand of hotness. She claimed that he was sexy in a John Krasinski way, then I said that John Krasinski is more cute than sexy, and then she was like, “Oh, so you admit you find Drew sexy, which, FYI, means you totally want to have sex with him,” and then stared at me like she was a detective on Law & Order and she’d cornered me into a confession, which was very annoying.
So here I am googling Drew, trying to convince myself . . . what, exactly? This is like when I look up the Facebook profile of some girl I hated in college—like I’m hoping to find something that confirms my feelings and makes me say, “Yep, still hate her, I was right all along.” I already know plenty of annoying things about Drew, and from the safety of my blanket cocoon, I intend to find out about any scandals or embarrassments.
At first, I don’t come across anything juicy; just his IMDb page and a Wikipedia article that tells me where he went to high school and that he was the football team’s mascot.
On the second page of results, I see a post on a blog called Hollywood Gossip. In glaring capital letters, the headline screams, “HOLLYWOOD HUNK DREW DANFORTH VISITS DYING GRANDFATHER,” right above a picture of Drew next to an ailing elderly man. A fake smile is pasted on Drew’s face, but it can’t hide the exhaustion and anguish he’s obviously feeling. It’s so raw that I’m uncomfortable looking at it, and I wonder how the hell this picture even ended up on this terrible website.
I click away and onto an article about Drew’s most famous relationship: the years-long one between him and Gillian Roberts, his costar on Mike’s Restaurant. They slowly fell in love on the show, but apparently in real life they got together a lot more quickly. Gillian played this supposedly mousy waitress on the show, someone who didn’t wear a lot of makeup and had messy hair and never really dressed up (so . . . someone a lot of us, myself included, related to). But in real life? I scroll through pictures of her on the red carpet, her hair sculpted into waves and some designer dress hugging her perfectly toned body. She’s beautiful. I remind myself that she has trainers and nutritionists and professional hair and makeup artists, but I can’t help comparing myself and my hair (abysmal) and wardrobe (leggings-based) to the glamour on my screen.
I click away from that article, too, and keep reading results. Aside from the time he was photographed making out with a Victoria’s Secret model at a party, most of the articles have headlines that refer to Drew as a “Hollywood prankster” or “funnyman” and are about all the weird things I already know he did.
Does this guy take anything seriously? Or does he think his entire life is a joke, when most people would literally chop off a body part to have the career and